SOURCE: An obituary in The Times, London, August 19, 1994, p. 19.

[In the obituary below, the critic provides a broad survey of Canetti's life and career.]

Elias Canetti was the first British citizen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after Winston Churchill in 1953. He had lived in London from 1938 until the 1970s when he moved to Zurich, but few outside an informed minority in this country had heard of him when the Nobel Committee made its decision in 1981. The citation made mention of "his broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic powers", but the remarkable thing was how frustratingly little of what was, in any case, a slim body of work had been translated from the German.

However, several of his books have achieved classic status. The first was a novel, Die Blendung (1935), translated into English in 1946. The second was a massive anthropological study on the psychology, history...